Album Review: Royal Trux – White Stuff

By R. Overwater

Royal Trux – White Stuff
Fat Possum

White Stuff is the first full-fledged Royal Trux album since 2000’s Pound for Pound and if you’ve been patiently awaiting more of this band’s low-fi, sloppy-Stones-blues-slurry, you’ll likely be pleased. Here, Royal Trux founders Jennifer Herrema and Michael Hagerty continue the famously drug-addled meandering they first embarked on in the late ’80s.

But this doesn’t seem like music originating from a warm, velvety heroin-cocoon. Nor does it come from the abrasive, jaw-grinding stridency of the cocaine use alluded to on the album cover. This is the lurching, attention-deficit-causing buzz of a trailer-park concoction whipped up from a case of cough syrup and a jug of household cleaner.

Sounding like a string of tape-splices, the title track kicks the album off with tight guitar- stylings jammed between jumbled piles of slacker-rock fuzz. Next, Herrema and Haggerty drift into the syrupy glue-trap that is “Year of the Dog.”

By the time White Stuff finally hangs itself on the sharp hooks of “Under Ice,” we’ve been treated to a rock album as satisfying as it is disparate. And, make no mistake, this is a rock ‘n’ roll album. Which means that, in 2019, White Stuff deserves to be heralded as the rare and magical beast that it is.